Book News Roundup: Seattle Magazine is under new management. Who's going to pay the freelancers that Seattle Magazine stiffed?

  • Geekwire chairman and Seattle tech capitalist Jonathan Sposato bought Seattle magazine, Geekwire reports. Seattle's future has been in doubt since its owner, Tiger Oak media, filed for bankruptcy last fall.
    “If it’s the case that the internet killed print, then Seattle mag now speaks internet,” [Sposato] said. “I aim to bring my understanding of how to build successful consumer internet and tech companies to Seattle mag, investing heavily on the digital side. We have lots of very cool ideas there. That said, on the print side there will always be a very human desire to curl up on the couch with beautiful glossy magazines.”
  • Tiger Oak had been struggling financially for a good long time, and Seattle's freelancers have used the news of Sposato's Seattle purchase to point out that the magazine owes a lot of writers a lot of money:

  • A Bellevue College administrator tried to remove Bellevue businessman Miller Freeman's name from an artwork recalling the Japanese internment camps. Instead, that act of vandalism only served to remind the region what a huge piece of shit Miller Freeman really was.

  • One more thought about the act of Miller Freeman erasure: I don't see the "colleges-are-killing-free-speech" crowd standing up to protest Bellevue College for this act of censorship. Could it be because the censorship was committed in an attempt to protect one of Bellevue's wealthiest families? Funny how disingenuous the free speech absolutists are: they love to send grief down to hippie schools like Evergreen, but they are conspicuously silent when real censorship happens at schools that aren't stereotypically liberal. One might be tempted to call the free-speechers hypocrites.